2024 Reflections: The year Product Upload was born

Humble beginnings

We moved cities to a little place called Nelson, New Zealand in 2024 and with that big life change came an ambition to build things that matter outside my day job. As I said in my Product Upload story post, the idea for Product Upload came kind of out of nowhere. But I'm so glad it did.

Originally I had this idea that Product Upload would be like a search engine. It'd just take a prompt, like "Adidas Gazelle Black" or whatever. And then it would magic up a product listing. So I built that concept and tested it with a bunch of Google ads. But it didn't really work. I think it was too magic and didn't give enough control to people needing to add products to their store.

So I watched my mum and Jess (my wife) a bit more and they both were working with authoritative suppliers. They knew what they wanted to add to their store. They just needed a way to do it quickly. So I pivoted the idea to be more direct and copy products directly from the target websites rather than doing "research" and coming up with a listing out of thin air. And that's when things really started to make sense to prospective customers.

A few baby steps

Pretty quickly it became clear that alongside the functionality, the user experience was going to be key. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to copy products from their suppliers' websites. So I spent a lot of time on building native apps for Wix and Shopify. This way people could copy products directly from their suppliers' websites into their store without leaving the platform.

I also wanted to keep it simple. I didn't want to overcomplicate things. So I built a bunch of features that I thought would be useful and then I tested them with real users. I got a lot of feedback and made a lot of changes. But I think it was worth it. The product is now much better than it was at the start of the year.

Starting to grow up

It's crazy to think it's only been 6 months since I started working on Product Upload. But in that time I've honed in on what I think is a really important problem to solve. I've built a product that I think is really useful and I've got a bunch of people using it every day. I'm really excited to see where it goes next.

Next year we're going to really grow this thing, my vision is to see listing quality get more and more impressive, I want to move the needle on the time it takes to setup a store and I want to further expand into other parts of managing products. I'm excited for it, and I hope you are too.

Join us on the mission

If you're interested in the future of Product Upload, I'd love to hear from you. I'm always looking for feedback, ideas, and people who have a vision for what this app does / could do.

Drop me a line on [email protected].

And most importantly... Have a great new year and see you in 2025!

Harrison